Thanks for visiting i4LCD’s blog:

The Nature of Design in Brief

This month’s Case Study Spotlight is with Steve Traxler, retired U.S. Fish and Wildlife biologist. The mission of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is working with others to conserve, protect, and enhance fish, wildlife, plants, and their habitats for the continuing benefit of the American people. Steve was the Peninsular Florida Landscape Conservation Cooperative Science Coordinator for 7 years, and worked on Everglades restoration for 22 years. He earned a Master’s degree in Fisheries at Texas A&M University, and a Bachelor’s degree at Florida Institute of Technology.

The Institute for Landscape Conservation Design (i4LCD) promotes practitioners with diverse experiences in landscape conservation design: we share their stories and highlight their project work. Would you like to be considered for a case study spotlight? Contact us at: info@lcdinstitute.org. Include “Case Study Spotlight” in the Subject line, and provide a short summary of your past or ongoing LCD project.

Let’s get started: Steve Traxler on Convening Stakeholders

Day 4,008: Practitioner Spotlight – Steve Traxler

i4LCD: Introduce yourself to our readers, Steve?

Steve: I am a recent retiree. I worked for 24 years in the field of conservation planning and ecology, primarily in the southeast U.S. and Florida. I spent 8 years with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and 16 years with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS). Most of that work was related to planning for restoration of the Everglades, and then later, working on the adaptive management part of the project. From 2008 to present I was involved with scenario planning, and in 2011, became one of the Science Coordinators for the Peninsular Florida Landscape Conservation Cooperative (PFLCC). As Science Coordinator, I engaged a diverse set of stakeholders in developing landscape-level science for the State of Florida, focusing on landscape conservation design and target setting. I currently work with a marine conservation nonprofit: InWater Research Group, Inc. which specializes in sea turtle demographics.

i4LCD: What first interested you in your field of expertise?

Steve: I spent the first part of my career developing the Everglades restoration plan and its adaptive management program. Everglades restoration involved a diverse set of stakeholders that came together for the largest restoration project of its time. South Florida had multiple problems that needed to be considered as part of the plan, so an active stakeholder participation process was developed. The principles of adaptive management were incorporated into the project to help with the project’s high degree of uncertainty.

Seven years ago, I started working with the PFLCC. After working on the Everglades project for many years, I gravitated to the Landscape Conservation Cooperatives (LCC) and started working with a steering committee composed of a diverse set of stakeholders that had an interest in on-the-ground restoration in Florida. Florida has had a 30-year history of statewide science where we know what and where to conserve, but the PFLCC was developing a landscape-level design consisting of clear targets and strategies for on-the-ground restoration. For me, working with the LCCs was the holy grail of conservation and the best job I ever had by far.

i4LCD: Do you have any experience convening stakeholders specifically as it relates to landscape conservation design (LCD)?

Steve: In 2007, the federal government started engaging in climate change discussions again. I was able to work with USFWS and U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) managers in south Florida to fund a couple of scenario planners/landscape architects out of MIT to develop stakeholder-based multi-parameter conservation scenarios for south Florida. MIT professors, Dr Michael Flaxman and Juan Carlos Vargas, were experts in developing stakeholder-based scenarios. Through a series of convening workshops and focus meetings, stakeholders helped develop the south Florida scenarios which explored climate change, conservation policy assumptions, population growth, and conservation funding. In 2011, these scenarios were expanded to the PFLCC boundary. Scenarios covering the whole state were used to look at questions pertaining to conservation easements and fee title purchase of lands and waters as a strategy to combat climate change.

i4LCD: Generally speaking, who were the stakeholders you convened? Were they from a single institution or multiple institutions?

Steve: The 200+ stakeholders we convened represented various federal/state government agencies, non-government organizations, universities, and private entities from a large pool of sectors that influence conservation. Methods such as influence diagrams were used to determine additional stakeholders.

i4LCD: What were the stakeholders’ interests in LCD? What “value added” did they believe existed, or could potentially exist, as a result of their participation in LCD?

Steve: The statewide scenarios became part of the design process for the PFLCC steering committee. They helped facilitate conversations about various conservation strategies. We used a number of convening workshops over the last 2-3 years to help develop clear conservation targets and to link to the Florida State Wildlife Action Plan. The stakeholders were very interested in the application of the strategies to on-the-ground conservation. The other important part of the convening workshops were the focused conversations that occurred about the various stages of LCD. The scenarios that we developed combine with the conservation target workshops helped facilitate those conversations.

i4LCD: From a coordinating professional’s perspective, and if different from the stakeholders’ perspective above, can you speak to the importance of convening stakeholders and the “value added” that can result from broad stakeholder participation in LCD?

Steve: Broad stakeholder participation can add time to a project on the front end, but should create a more accepted and supported project on the back end. By incorporating input from a wide variety of stakeholders and creating a LCD with that input, can result in a vision that is more likely to be realized.

i4LCD: What is the purpose of convening stakeholders?

Steve: Convening is a critical part of LCD. It’s not a one and done process, but rather, should be done throughout LCD. This is the part of LCD where stakeholders meet and learn about each others interests; and equally as important, where champions for the design are developed and/or found. Being able to convene diverse stakeholders in a social setting where they they can be heard and participate in developing objectives and a vision for the landscape sets the stage for the LCD outcome. Using a wide variety of techniques in convening stakeholders through each LCD step, especially during the strategy development portion of the process, can help create opportunities for stakeholders to initiate and complete the LCD, facilitate on the ground action, and improve on the ground conservation success.

Conservation planning has been working for years, and in many places has yielded great results, but now we have additional and stronger stressors. In my home state of Florida, we have about 33% of the state in some type of conservation status. However, the state’s population is growing at a rate of 1,100 people per day, and increased temperature and sea level rise are causing issues all over the state. As I write this blog, I am unable to leave my condo because of a red tide caused from too many people and sprawling developments combined with increased temperatures, sea level rise, and poor water management. The red tide covers most of south Florida and is killing thousands of fish, as well as sea turtles, manatees, and dolphins. When I walk outside I immediately start coughing and my throat and eyes burn. Very few people are outside and most are wearing masks. All of the beaches in my area are closed. The odds of the red tide occurring, could have been greatly reduced or eliminated if the Everglades restoration had been completed over the past 18 years (the project was authorized in 2000).

i4LCD: Stakeholders are busy people. What processes/techniques do you use to keep them focused, engaged and actively participating in the project over the long haul?

Steve: There are a number of techniques both to determine who the stakeholders are (e.g., influence diagrams) and how to keep stakeholders active and involved. Projects with long timelines (i.e., 5+ years) need methods to continue to educate, as well as include, new and old participants. Well designed meetings with outcomes and decisions are critical to keeping people engaged. Burnout and turnover are common and multi-media and face to face participation workshops are needed to educate and continue to convene. Social media and websites are important for keeping stakeholders up to date, but face to face interactions are incredibly important to develop trust. Again, developing and identifying project champions (i.e., local-level advocates) is critically important for long term success. So is identifying clear objectives and outcomes for the project. In the projects I’ve been involved in, having a core team of 5-7 individuals to do most of the heavy lifting is critical to success.

i4LCD: What specific products do stakeholders develop, particularly early in the design process, that guide the rest of the LCD?

Steve: I already mentioned the importance of establishing clear objectives, outcomes, and a unified vision. Additionally, measurable targets are important. Targets need to cover a wide range of stakeholder interests. The South Atlantic Blueprint developed by the South Atlantic LCC has an annual report card which gives realistic scores from A-F of a number of targets covering the important aspects of their design. Stakeholders can review these targets and implement and develop strategies which can increase their score in future years. One other really important part of the SALCC Blueprint is that the team has members whose primary job is to train and work with stakeholders on how to use the blueprint and the multitude of tools associated with the blueprint. That critical aspect of that team helps make the various steps of the LCD an iterative process, more functional, and helps to keep stakeholders engaged.

i4LCD: What inspires you and gives you hope for the future?

Steve: Currently, three things inspire me. The first is my colleagues and their amazing work ethic. Many of the people that I have meet through the LCCs are true visionaries and some of the best people I ever worked with. The second thing that inspires me is my fellow Floridians. In 2014, voters passed The Florida Water and Land Conservation Initiative, Amendment 1 which generates roughly $900 million per year! Between Amendment 1 funding and RESTORE Act funding, Florida has never seen more conservation dollars at work in the state. Lastly, I am inspired by my grandchildren. My wife Debbie and I have 7 grandkids (ages 2 thru 17). Watching them grow up, listening to what they think and what motivates them has given me hope for the future. From my perspective the reason LCD is so important can be summed up in the American Indian passage: “Treat the earth well: it was not given to you by your parents, it was loaned to you by your children. We do not inherit the Earth from our Ancestors, we borrow it from our Children.”

i4LCD: Do you have any final thoughts to share?

Steve: Dream big! We live in confusing times with lots of distractions. LCD, and especially the convening aspect of it, give us an opportunity to work with partners and stakeholders from a wide variety of backgrounds and talents. Being able to bring together different skill sets and creating a vision of the future is extremely important. With the very recent climate change targets being released and with the human population skyrocketing, conservation has never been more important. The lands that we protect and preserve will be the lands of the future critical for human life on earth.

Get outside! It’s easy to get lost in the minutia associated with work. Go out and visit a place or habitat you have never been to. Rather than Googling pictures of it actually go out and feel it with all of your senses. One of my favorite colleagues to work with, during his workshops would always include a half or whole day to go and do something incredible. My favorite was seeing 2-3% of the whooping crane population. It was an amazing experience and that made that workshop extremely memorable, out of the hundreds of workshops/meeting I attended in my career. I can still describe what the objectives, and results, of the workshop were.

Lastly, exercise your right to vote and have your voice heard!

Want to be a contributing researcher?

]]>4820Day 4,067: Practitioner Spotlight – John Mankowskihttps://www.lcdinstitute.org/day-4067-practitioner-spotlight-john-mankowski-2/
Tue, 13 Nov 2018 17:00:56 +0000https://www.lcdinstitute.org/?p=4793This month’s Practitioner Spotlight is with John Mankowski. John has worked in the field of collaborative conservation in the Pacific Northwest for over 30 years.

Thanks for visiting i4LCD’s blog:

The Nature of Design in Brief

This month’s Practitioner Spotlight is with John Mankowski. John has worked in the field of collaborative conservation in the Pacific Northwest for over 30 years. He currently works as an independent contractor and provides services including facilitation, environmental policy and strategy development, intergovernmental relations, tribal relations, public involvement, and strategic communications.

Prior to beginning his own business, John served as the Coordinator for the North Pacific Landscape Conservation Cooperative (NPLCC) where he provided leadership, partner engagement, policy direction, and management oversight of that international, self-directed, collaborative conservation partnership. Before joining the NPLCC, John served as Governor Gregoire’s Natural Resource Policy Advisor. In that role he advised the Governor on a broad array of natural resources-related issues including fish and wildlife policy and management; federal, state, and private lands issues; tribal relations; agricultural production, export, and labor policies; outdoor recreation; renewable energy development; climate change and adaptation; and response to natural resource disasters.

The Institute for Landscape Conservation Design (i4LCD) promotes practitioners with diverse experiences in landscape conservation design. We share their stories and highlight their project work. If you would like to be considered for a Practitioner Spotlight interview, contact us at: info@lcdinstitute.org, include “Practitioner Spotlight” in the Subject line, and give a short summary of your expertise and/or related landscape conservation design project.

Let’s get started: John Mankowski on Convening Stakeholders

Day 4,067: Practitioner Spotlight – John Mankowski

i4LCD: Introduce yourself to our readers, John?

John: I am working now as a private consultant and am involved in several projects related to collaborative landscape conservation at the national and regional scales. Nationally, I’m engaged in helping support and sustain a policy framework that advances collaborative landscape conservation as federal priorities/resources shift to new priorities. Here in the Pacific Northwest, I am supporting a process to review the successes of the North Pacific Landscape Conservation Cooperative and help the partnership evolve to a new model that focuses on priority transboundary landscape conservation priorities as it becomes less dependent on funding from the USFWS. In addition, I am privileged to continue to work with partners of the PNW Coast Landscape Conservation Design Initiative, where I help with project leadership, advance tribal engagement, and lead development of a working lands component of that landscape conservation design (LCD).

i4LCD: What first interested you in your field of expertise?

John: I’ve always been drawn to the field of collaborative conservation knowing that my ability to contribute to sustaining biodiversity for future generations depended on my ability to influence the decisions of others: policy-makers, landowners, businesses, conservation organizations, and various public sectors. Throughout my career, I found ways to have an impact on conservation as a field biologist, as an agency policy lead, in the political environment working in the governor’s office, and in helping lead transboundary landscape conservation efforts. Each of these roles required different skills; but at all levels, I observed the power of convening like-minded people from different backgrounds to tackle difficult problems. I also learned the critical nature of being able to synthesize complex environmental information and integrate it into public policy dialogue. My current interest is driven by my desire to help those I work with understand and be prepared to address emerging environmental policy issues of our time, at the appropriate scales at which they occur. Landscape conservation design efforts are the perfect platform for this work.

i4LCD: Do you have any experience convening stakeholders specifically for one or more landscape conservation design (LCD) projects?

John: The North Pacific Landscape Conservation Cooperative initiated or supported three different LCD-like collaboratives. On the Kenai Peninsula, we supported work to convene partners and explore the potential value in conducting an LCD effort. In the transboundary region of the North Cascades of Washington and British Columbia , we partnered with others like the Great Northern LCC and provided needed support to amplify the work of an ongoing successful collaboration (Cascadia Partner Forum). In the coastal forested regions of western Washington and Oregon we supported the initiation of an LCD project that I remain actively involved with to this day (PNW Coast LCD).

i4LCD: Generally speaking, who were the stakeholders you convened? Were they from a single institution or multiple institutions? Were they generally from one or multiple sectors of society?

John: First off, let me underscore that the success of the PNW Coast LCD is the result of hard work from a team of folks – a backbone organization made up of inspired individuals with diverse backgrounds from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, other federal agencies (Forest Service, National Park Service), state agencies (fish and wildlife, natural resources, parks, transportation, commerce, etc.) from Washington and Oregon, NGOs, tribes, academia, and others. The project is now increasing its engagement with private agricultural and forest landowners. The list of stakeholders we convene is evolving as the partnership grows and advances through different phases of LCD.

i4LCD: What were the stakeholders hoping to achieve with LCD?

John: At its core, most stakeholders involved in this effort really want to know that their conservation work at local scales contributes, in some beneficial way, to conservation objectives of the broader region. They understand that their work is nested within larger landscapes, and by partnering with other practitioners in the region, they can affect change at a larger scale than any one of them working independently. Since large landscape-scale objectives have not been comprehensively identified for this area, much of the work of this partnership has been about creating partnerships (including social network analysis), understanding the landscape-scale stressors likely to affect the region (including scenario planning), and developing collaborative landscape-scale strategies to address these impacts (through a combination of Opens Standards for the Practice of Conservation, and LCD approaches).

i4LCD: Can you speak to the importance of convening stakeholders in LCD and the “value added” that can result from stakeholder participation in it?

John: The added value comes from engaging the diverse array of stakeholders whose decisions can ultimately determine the outcome of resource conditions in the region. In the diverse region of the PNW Coast LCD, that means bringing together those with management authorities over, or who can influence: 1) fish and wildlife (tribes, state agencies, federal agencies), 2) the habitats upon which they depend (federal, state, county governments; private landowners, NGOs), and 3) policies, programs, projects, and funding that affect the future of the region (elected officials, NGOs, agencies, and interested public sectors). By convening partners across the region and facilitating conversations among them, individual acts of conservation are being enriched by ecosystem-scale thinking.

An important attribute of the PNW Coast LCD, and others I’ve been involved with, is moving beyond top-down approaches to a more inclusive approach, with informal governance structures built around bringing people and communities together across boundaries to a create shared vision and take action on important, interrelated goals. Moving beyond the nature-versus-people dichotomy, LCD can benefit from people of diverse sectors, geographies, and cultures, providing opportunities to work together to sustain the long-term health of the places where we live, work and play.

i4LCD: What is the purpose of convening stakeholders? What sort of outcomes are you trying to achieve by bringing diverse stakeholders together? Why is it important that stakeholders be convened and participating in/throughout the design process?

John: Of course each LCD effort has its own purpose for convening, since the point of these local collaborations are to solve region-specific challenges; but, it’s important to ask that question early and often, and in as specific of terms as possible. The sharper the focus on the products partners expect (at what scale, and when) — the greater chance people will stay engaged, and ultimately use the products. For the PNW Coast LCD, the central purpose for convening stakeholders is to craft a common vision for the future conditions of this region. Stakeholders are seeking general consensus on what landscape-scale ecosystem services, and private sector services, they want this region to support in the future. Together they endeavor to explore which large-scale change agents might threaten those values (e.g., climate change impacts, energy development, transportation projects, urban growth, etc.); and, ultimately, the partnership hopes to develop collaborative strategies to address those change agents in ways that sustain ecosystem services and human values over time.

i4LCD: Stakeholders are busy people. What processes/techniques do you use to keep them focused, engaged and actively participating in the project over the long haul? Are those techniques generally successful or do you see declining participation nonetheless?

John: That’s definitely a challenge. The leadership team and facilitator are continually looking for the best ways to build and sustain the partnership, communicate successes, and respond to partners’ evolving needs and expectations. A variety of techniques are employed including strategic in-person meetings, briefings with organizational leadership, region-specific workshops, social network analysis, webinars, website and email lists, and more. Having dedicated staff and fiscal support from FWS has been key, along with a dedicated leadership team of inspired individuals from partner organizations.

i4LCD: What specific products do stakeholders develop, particularly early in the design process, that guide the rest of the LCD?

John: Ultimately, we want to develop landscape-scale strategies that maintain or restore connected landscapes and keep the region’s rural economies profitable and productive. The data, science, and map products that come out of the design process will offer the foundation for strategy development. At the same time, we need to find ways to keep the working farms and forests that support many of these ecosystem services, healthy and productive. We’re still in the early phases of the PNW Coast LCD and will learn more as we go developing about specific outputs and products the partners expect.

i4LCD: What inspires you and gives you hope for the future?

John: Landscape conservation design presents a huge opportunity to sustain communities and natural-resource dependent economies, to address climate change impacts, and to conserve/create resilient landscapes. LCD can address biodiversity, water and air, food and fiber, jobs and livelihoods, and people’s cultures. We see this occurring more frequently and at multiple scales across the US. The federal government made a huge investment in landscape conservation with the initial LCC program. NGOs and others are adding to this momentum and bringing in private entities and resources. It isn’t easy, and, ultimately we’ll have to show that partners benefit from their effort. Hopefully it’ll lead us away from conflict-laden conservation to better approach we all know is needed.

i4LCD: Do you have any final thoughts to share?

John: While landscape conservation design processes hold a lot of promise for achieving multiple partner conservation objectives at large scales, there are significant challenges we must address. These can include the lack of sustained resources/capacity, insufficient skills for individuals and organizations to work collaboratively, meeting fatigue, and the difficulty in measuring and demonstrating success. But let’s not be deterred, there are a ton of guidance resources available now, with more every day. Progress will continue to build from a broad range of practices and people in landscapes across the country. I would encourage people to look at the various LCD efforts springing up here and abroad. For a big-picture view, your web site, lcdinstitute.org, is a great place to start (particularly your Resources page), as is the Network for Landscape Conservation, and LCCNetwork.org.

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The Nature of Design in Brief

This month’s Practitioner Spotlight is with Jeff Allenby, Director of Conservation Technology at the Chesapeake Conservancy’s Conservation Innovation Center. Jeff has worked in the field of environmental management and geospatial analysis for over 11 years. Prior to joining the Chesapeake Conservancy in 2012, Jeff worked with the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science and the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, and at the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. Jeff has a Masters degree in Environmental Management and Certificate in Geospatial Analysis from Duke University, and a Bachelors of Science from the University of Richmond.

The Institute for Landscape Conservation Design (i4LCD) promotes practitioners with diverse experiences in landscape conservation design. We share their stories and highlight their project work. If you would like to be considered for a Practitioner Spotlight interview, contact us at: info@lcdinstitute.org, include “Practitioner Spotlight” in the Subject line, and give a short summary of your expertise and/or related landscape conservation design project.

Let’s get started: Jeff Allenby on Innovation in Conservation

Day 4,130: Practitioner Spotlight – Jeff Allenby

i4LCD: Who do you work for, Jeff?

Jeff: I’m the Director of Conservation Technology at the Chesapeake Conservancy and manage our Conservation Innovation Center (Center). The Center is an internationally recognized program focused on integrating technology and environmental management to address planning challenges throughout the Chesapeake Bay watershed and increasingly across the country. We work with partners to help understand the unique challenges and data needs they have in their daily work and create new solutions that provide them with the information they need in a format they can easily access and integrate into their existing workflow.

i4LCD: How does the Center do that?

Jeff: We use GIS and remote sensing to provide our partners with a better understanding of the landscape they live in. We identify where conservation or restoration practices could maximize environmental benefits, such as habitat, water quality, and climate resilience. As much as possible, we want to help our partners look at their geographies holistically and across sectors to identify landscapes that can provide a multitude of benefits and represent the best opportunities out of all potential projects, not just what has been submitted.

i4LCD: What first interested you in GIS and/or remote sensing work?

Jeff: I’ve always been drawn to the field of GIS because of its power to inform decision making and to organize a group’s thinking and strategy development by applying the right analysis to a pile of data. Throughout graduate school, I saw a lot of untapped potential to apply emerging technologies to the environmental world. As other industries quickly identified the benefits of increased computing power and “big data,” the environmental community was lagging behind, often constrained by the mentality of “that’s out of our reach.” I had a natural inclination to challenge those conventions and often found myself asking “why not?”

i4LCD: What are some of the major challenges society faces in the geographic area where you work?

Jeff: One of the biggest challenges the entire conservation community faces is how to accomplish our goals when funding is continually being reduced right as we start to make progress. The natural world has a bit of lag; you’re not always going to see immediate benefits to an action. There’s often criticism that the conservation community hasn’t made enough progress for the investments made over the last four decades. In light of that, we’re trying to help quantify the anticipated benefits of projects, helping partners communicate the importance of continued action, and give funders a greater sense of confidence that wise investments are being made.

Closer to home, here in the Chesapeake, there’s been a concerted effort since the early 1980’s to improve water quality. It’s been a multi-jurisdictional commitment that, for the most part, has been upheld, and we’re starting to see the Bay’s health come back. A lot of the progress we’ve made has been the result of accomplishing the “easy” things, like upgrading wastewater treatment plants and permanently protecting some of the largest, undeveloped portions of the watershed. To truly meet our goals, we’re going to have to work acre-by-acre, literally, focusing on much tougher issues like non-point source pollution in agricultural and urban systems. We’re looking to technology as a way to help pinpoint where actions would be most beneficial and make sure that we don’t lose the momentum we currently have.

i4LCD: Do you think a landscape approach can address any of those challenges?

Jeff: Absolutely! We’re working with multiple partners to create a landscape-scale conservation and restoration vision for the Chesapeake Bay. We’ve been supporting the Chesapeake Conservation Partnership for the last four years, creating their Conservation Atlas which identifies threats and capacity throughout the region. It prioritizes landscapes for five focal regions that provide the greatest mix of conservation benefits.

i4LCD: What’s the purpose of the project?

Jeff: The ultimate goal is to conserve 50% of the Chesapeake by 2050. The mapping analyses we’re doing will inform future conservation planning projects by developing a series of long-term conservation goals for farms, forests, habitat, heritage, and human health. Our work identifies existing resources and possible impediments to achieving identified goals. The Chesapeake Conservation Partnership has used the information to identify 11.5 million acres of highly valued lands for conservation, meaning lands that have multiple overlapping values, such as farms, forests, and heritage lands. That’s 11.5 million acres in addition to the 8.8 million acres that are already permanently protected land in the watershed.

i4LCD: What does innovation look like within the context of landscape conservation design?

Jeff: A lot of the work we’re doing is focused on creating the data and tools our partners need to operate at a very fine scale, often at a sub-parcel/sub-field scale. Simultaneously, we are conducting these baseline assessments landscape-wide, identifying all of the conservation and restoration opportunities so we can evaluate individual projects within the context of the entire landscape, not just the few projects that have been proposed. The cost of processing data has dropped dramatically over the last five years so now we can leverage “big data” in our planning efforts and identify meaningful insights about the “best” places to work at various scales.

i4LCD: Can you give us a sense of what innovations are in development that might be useful in landscape conservation design?

Jeff: In the coming years, the conservation community will be using “near real-time” integrated models that don’t just model the potential benefits of an individual project (similar to what we have now), but we’ll be able to assess the interrelated impacts of a project with everything else that is going on in the landscape. We have the foundation for a lot of these models now, such as the Chesapeake Bay TMDL suite of models. However, because they’re so complex and rely on a variety of datasets that are only updated every 1-2 years. I see these models, and the datasets they run on, moving towards a system where they become “living” models. As projects are implemented or new information is collected, the model will automatically be updated and all of the interrelated aspects of the model will adjust accordingly. That will dramatically improve decision-making as planners and managers are able to proactively determine the impacts, both immediate and indirect, of proposed actions. We’ll be able to see how changes in the landscape are impacting critical environmental systems as they happen, instead of years later.

i4LCD: What inspires you and gives you hope for the future, Jeff?

Jeff: The ingenuity and passion of the partners we work with. Every project that we work on is essentially an applied research project. We work with partners to help understand what their current practice is, where they have roadblocks and inefficiencies, and then determine an appropriate path forward, creating new data, tools, or methodologies where needed. Without exception, the work our partners are doing and the creativity they’ve shown in building systems in a resource constrained environment, making the most of limited funding and time that they have, is incredible. In a lot of our work, we are releasing a bottleneck and it is amazing to see how quickly our partners embrace their new capabilities and how it accelerates the pace with which they are working. I’m excited to see how the fundamental nature of conservation and restoration is going to change in the coming decade, moving from a system that prioritizes effort, or how many trees were planted, to a system that incentivizes performance; getting the trees in the right places to maximize their impact.

i4LCD: Do you have any final thoughts to share, Jeff?

Jeff: I firmly believe that we are on the cusp of a revolution in land management and planning. Joel Dunn, the Chesapeake Conservancy’s President, often compares where we’re at to Bob Dylan’s performance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, where he moved from acoustic to electric. We are only beginning to see the impacts, and benefits, of the technology that is just becoming available to the conservation movement. I’m excited to see how our community embraces it and begins to think differently about how decisions are made. Models are always going to have to make assumptions and offer an abstraction of the “real world”, but we are beginning to have the tools available to us that allow that abstraction to become less of a Picasso and more of a Monet. The natural world is incredibly complex and our understanding of it is still maturing. Part of my role is to make sure that technology, or our access to it, isn’t the barrier to making the best decisions possible.

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There are 4,170 days until the deadline for

Welcome to i4LCD’s Practitioner Spotlight!

The Institute for Landscape Conservation Design (i4LCD) promotes practitioners with diverse experiences in landscape conservation design. We share their stories and highlight their project work. If you would like to be considered for a Practitioner Spotlight interview, contact us at: info@lcdinstitute.org, include “Practitioner Spotlight” in the Subject line, and give a short summary of your ability and/or related landscape conservation design project.

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Day 4,170: Practitioner Spotlight – Tom Miewald

This month’s Practitioner Spotlight is with Tom Miewald, Landscape Ecologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Science Applications program. Tom has worked on large-scale science and planning projects in many sectors, including academia, private consulting, non-profit organizations, and federal government. For the past 5 years, Tom’s work has focused on collaborative landscape conservation planning. He holds two degrees from the University of Nebraska: a Bachelor’s in Environmental Studies, and a Master’s in Geography.

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i4LCD: Who do you work for, Tom?

Tom: I work for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS, Service) in Portland, Oregon. The Service’s mission is “Working with others to conserve, protect, and enhance fish, wildlife, plants, and their habitats for the continuing benefit of the American people.”

i4LCD: What’s your field of practice?

Tom: I’m a Geographer by training. What I find myself working on any given day as a Service employee isn’t identified in any federal position description. I spend a lot of time preparing for stakeholder workshops, working through gnarly issues related to landscape-scale analyses, and locating money and other resources so partners can continue doing the great work that they do.

i4LCD: What first interested you in geography?

Tom: I grew up in Nebraska where there isn’t much unplowed nature. I used to love to experience the wide open spaces and topographic relief of the west when I traveled as a kid. I was a total map geek, even back then. When I got to college, I changed my major a few times: from art, to anthropology, to environmental studies. I chose Geography for my Master’s work because it combined the natural and social sciences, plus it had awesome technology I could tinker with, like geographic information systems (GIS) and remote sensing. I developed a real passion for modeling ecosystems and species at broad spatial scales. I realized after doing that sort of work for a few years that the only people looking at my work were academics and graduate students; not on-the-ground resource managers. Now I’m interested in exploring how to engage people in deliberative processes so their perspectives can be incorporated into natural resources decision-making. Landscape conservation design and theiCASS Platform is one way to do that.

i4LCD: What are some of the major challenges the conservation community faces?

Tom: The future of the earth is 10 billion people sharing limited space with each other and other critters. Add on top of that, the challenge of a rapidly changing climate. How do we deal with that? It’s a huge question. The fact that society is increasingly fragmented in how we think and act doesn’t help us find an answer. Fragmented agencies, fragmented budgets, fragmented attention spans; it’s no surprise we have fragmented landscapes! If our goal is to protect species and conserve ecosystem services, we need to identify a shared vision for the landscape and begin to build it out.

Tom: I believe so. LCD processes help facilitate development of a holistic, landscape perspective, and that’s what’s needed to develop good public policy and make sound conservation investments. To facilitate LCD, we need networks of public and private entities all working together to achieve shared goals. I don’t mean to suggest the path forward is clear or easy, but that’s what it’s going to take to address what we’re up against.

i4LCD: What are some of the specific challenges you face as a LCD practitioner?

Tom: Generally speaking, practitioners like myself have a hard time helping stakeholders’ think beyond their own jurisdictional boundaries. It’s an interesting phenomena really because we all know biodiversity transcends human-defined boundaries, but jurisdictional missions and mandates are strong and influence stakeholders. Another challenge is related to getting local-level folks engaged. It’s just easier to get academics and scientists to review our landscape models then it is to get county planners and ranchers to do it. Lastly, we’re not doing a very good job translating the science and decision-making products so the public understand what we’re trying to do or care about our work. We need to do a better job of that, or LCD is just another academic exercise that isn’t relevant to local stakeholders.

i4LCD: What inspires you as a LCD practitioner?

Tom: People in the Pacific Northwest really inspire me. They care about their landscapes and have a lot of energy. They’re willing to take on challenging projects and try innovative ideas. If things don’t work out as originally planned, they embrace it as a learning experience. They’re passionate, imaginative, and committed to landscape conservation, and I’m really honored to be working with them. I think with perseverance, we’ll move towards our collective goals of sustainable landscapes in the Northwest.

i4LCD: Are you currently working on a LCD project?

Tom: Yeah, I’ve worked on a few LCD projects in the Pacific Northwest over the years. Some have been nice success stories. Others have been rough rides. I am currently coordinating a design process in the Pacific Northwest Coastal Ecoregion. That’s been a great experience.

i4LCD: What do the stakeholders hope the project will achieve?

Tom: We have a fairly diverse body of stakeholders engaged in the project right now, but we’re always trying to get new folks involved like private landowners, county planners, etc. Some themes that tie the project together include social and ecological connectivity. The concept of connectivity brings together ideas like habitat corridors and intact landscapes, which are important for protecting biodiversity and conserving ecosystem services. We’ve hosted many stakeholder meetings and facilitated lots of dialogue. We emphasize that forestry, agricultural, and other working lands are important parts of an ecologically connected landscape. Another key theme that we want to impart is that ecological, social, and economic aspects of landscape design should be on the same par.

i4LCD: Can you give us a sense of the process you’re using to develop the design?

Tom: We have an excellent group of state, federal, tribal, and non-profit representatives that make up the leadership team. We also have a project plan that is loosely based on the iCASS Platform and the recommended practices for LCD that were developed by the Landscape Conservation Cooperatives. We’ve been using those resources to structure our work. We’ve found that if you have too rigid of a work plan, the project will fail. Conversely, if you have too loose of a work plan, and you try to do everything, it will also fail. There’s a delicate balance we’re trying to navigate.

i4LCD: What type of products do you expect resulting from the design?

Tom: Ultimately, we want to develop landscape-scale strategies that maintain or restore connected landscapes. The data, science, and corridor maps that comes out of the design process will offer the foundation for strategy development. One thing we don’t want to develop is a 10-pound document with terabytes of data that people can’t digest.

i4LCD: Do you have any last thoughts to share?

Tom: In talking with some folks, I get a sense there’s a reticence towards landscape science and strategy development. That if it’s not “boots on the ground” conservation, it’s not real. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Some of the most important innovations in conservation have come through understanding broader-scale issues. For instance, satellite imagery of deforestation in Amazonia lead to development of a global movement; and our understanding of migration flyways lead to the design of the National Wildlife Refuge System. Understanding landscape patterns is incredibly important. I agree that most of our conservation dollars need to go to on-the-ground work. However, to increase our effectiveness, we need innovative institutions, like the Landscape Conservation Cooperatives, that are able to coordinate and facilitate deliberative, science-based dialogues between multi-jurisdiction, multi-sector stakeholders that ultimately lead to strategic decision-making. That’s what LCD is all about.

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]]>4521Day 4,200: Practitioner Spotlight: Genevieve Johnsonhttps://www.lcdinstitute.org/day-4200-practitioner-spotlight-genevieve-johnson/
Fri, 29 Jun 2018 18:26:10 +0000https://www.lcdinstitute.org/?p=4310This month’s Practitioner Spotlight is with Genevieve Johnson, the Program Manager for the Desert Landscape Conservation Cooperative & Salton Sea projects. Gen has worked in the field of conservation and natural resources planning for over 10 years.

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Welcome to i4LCD’s Practitioner Spotlight!

The Institute for Landscape Conservation Design (i4LCD) promotes practitioners with diverse experiences in landscape conservation design: we share their stories and highlight their work. Would you like to be considered for a Practitioner Spotlight interview? Contact us at: info@lcdinstitute.org. Include “Practitioner Spotlight” in the Subject line, and give a short summary of your expertise and/or related LCD project.

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Day 4,200: Practitioner Spotlight – Genevieve Johnson

This month’s Practitioner Spotlight is with Genevieve Johnson, the Program Manager for the Desert Landscape Conservation Cooperative & Salton Sea projects. Genevieve has worked in the field of conservation and natural resources planning for over 10 years. She has worked for the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management managing resource management plans, and for the Arizona State Parks Open Space program furthering land conservation as a planner. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Conservation Biology and a Master of Science in Urban and Environmental Planning.

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i4LCD: Who do you work for, Gen?

Genevieve: I work for the Bureau of Reclamation (BOR) in Boulder City, NV. The Bureau’s mission is “to manage, develop, and protect water and related resources in an environmentally and economically sound manner in the interest of the American public.”

i4LCD: What is your field of practice, and what first interested you in that work?

Genevieve: I am an environmental planner, building conservation partnerships for over 10 years. I became interested in planning because I believe we should integrate conservation work with the way people live in landscapes. For example, I have used a planning process that analyzed how people associated with their community “jurisdictions”, including where they recreated, found solace, where they traveled for work, etc. The community boundaries people identify with do not match with the city, county, state, or federal jurisdictions we use to delineate our planning projects. We know nature does not adhere to our political boundaries. It makes no sense to plan for wildlife, water and other resources using political boundaries. We need to plan for people’s interactions with those resources across jurisdictional boundaries. It is the only way we can make a real difference in meeting human and environmental needs.

i4LCD: Totally. So, what inspires you and gives you hope for the future in the way we plan?

Genevieve: Many things! We are making progress in taking a socio-ecological systems (i.e., a landscape) approach to our conservation work. This is inevitably a slow process because we must engage a diversity of stakeholders, but this engagement is crucial! So many people care about the issues we face. When we, as a society, care about something near and dear to our hearts, we find solutions. I am very hopeful about the next generation of practitioners. They are learning how to integrate socio-ecological information beyond a siloed approach. It is exciting that they can dramatically change how we plan, design, and manage socio-ecological landscapes.

i4LCD: You believe the next generation will be able to overcome the challenges your field faces?

Genevieve: The conversation stakeholders are having about climate change, land and water degradation, biodiversity loss, etc. are complex [Editor’s Note: some would say “wicked”] and need a new approach to address them. It is easy for stakeholders to become paralyzed by the complexity of issues, lack of information, or even the immense amount of information they have. They need better processes and tools to retrieve and manage information. I believe the next generation will be incredibly well-versed in those skills. Of course, information can only inform decisions, not make them for us. There will never be an easy or single “right” decision in landscape conservation projects. The next generation will need to be effective facilitators that understand the importance of deliberative processes, collaborative decision-making, and multi-jurisdiction/multi-sector partnerships. They, and the organizations they work for, will need to be open to iterative learning processes, collective decision-making, and compromise. They will need to integrate multiple disciplines such as economics, transportation planning, and urban development into conservation to meet multiple and sometimes, seemingly divergent, goals.

i4LCD: What are some of the major challenges society faces in the geographic area where you work?

Genevieve: Stakeholders throughout the Southwest are looking holistically at water management, population growth and associated infrastructure, and how climate change impacts social and ecological needs for water. We need to do a better job at integrating the needs of species and ecosystems into water management systems. They provide people with a sense of place and improved quality of life. It also makes economic sense to have our environment do the work for us. For instance, New York City preserved wetlands to improve the quality of drinking water instead of building more water treatment plants. It was less expensive and provided multiple benefits. Residents in Flagstaff, AZ approved a $10 million bond to support forest restoration work to improve their drinking water and reduce the risks of post-wildfire flooding, which also benefits wildlife.

i4LCD: Do you think a landscape approach can address any of those challenges?

Genevieve: Yes, I think a landscape approach provides the platform necessary to discuss large challenges. It allows us to share smaller-scale solutions and learn from each other, which speeds up implementation across large areas. A landscape approach brings diverse interests together and gives them an opportunity to talk about why they care about the landscape they live in. For example, the Aleutian and Bering Sea Islands LCC worked with stakeholders to identify safe shipping routes that not only reduced risks to wildlife, but also improved safety for marine vessels traveling through the Bering Sea. When people articulate what matters to them, they often find they have more in common with each other than initially thought. Focusing on things that people have in common increases their chances of success. Success is incredibly important.

i4LCD: Is there a specific project you are working on that tests that hypothesis?

Genevieve: I am currently working with partners on landscape conservation projects located in the Mojave, Sonoran, and Chihuahua deserts. The Institute’s readers can learn more about those projects by visiting the Desert Landscape Conservation Cooperative website.

i4LCD: Can you give us a sense of the processes the stakeholders are using?

Genevieve: We use a collaborative, stakeholder-driven process to define and meet shared conservation goals. We combine data, information, and models to develop adaptation strategies that managers can carry out to protect habitats and ecological processes across the landscape (Editor’s Note: Learn more about the Desert LCC’s process here).

i4LCD: That’s a nice segue to our next blog actually. Will you come back and tell us more about your projects in the near future?